It employs readily available medical devices such as ultrasound, feeding tubes, guidewires and dilators.

Current procedures to insert gastrostomy tubes require expensive, inpatient hospital equipment and have high complication rates between 4% and 20%. The need for highly trained specialists, operating room time, and use of specialized equipment including endoscopes, fluoroscopes and Computed Tomography (CT) scanners, translates into higher consultation costs, greater patient wait times, and additional hospital admission costs. On the in-patient side of the hospital, gastrostomy tube placement can be the bottle-neck for stepping down a patient from an ICU setting. Moving this mid-level procedure from specialists in a suite to ultrasound-savvy physicians at the point of care eliminates the bottle-neck.

The current gastrostomy tube market is ~$525M+ annually and projected to exceed $650M by 2020. Given the aging population both in the United States and Asia (China, India), and the growing prevalence of chronic diseases, the number of gastrostomy tube insertions will continue to rise. By creating a safe procedure that uses less costly clinical inputs, our disruptive approach is directly comparable to the model by which several other common medical procedures have successfully won and enlarged markets. We estimate that the PUG procedure will drive an increase in the total number of procedures and that pricing above current levels will be feasible given the net added value of the PUG approach compared to current procedures.

CoapTech’s PUMA-G System for PUG has received FDA clearance via the standard 510(k) pathway. CoapTech has filed patent applications broadly with solid intellectual property basis as indicated by legal counsel review of IP landscape.

As CoapTech`s first product is established in the marketplace for use in the PUG procedure, additional applications of the device to other procedure markets will be pursued by CoapTech to leverage the core technology, expand the company, and improve care quality, cost, safety, and access to patients around the world.

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